In all likelihood Google has already found your site. Their indexing software is massive and very thorough. They send out billions of queries every day and have already indexed a huge portion of the web. The problem is that Google is choosing to not display your website prominently in its search results. Here’s how to change that.
1. Post High Quality Content
The number one way to increase traffic to your website is to post lots of high quality content. This will increase your search rankings quicker than anything. What is quality content? There are several ways to measure that. High quality content is original, it’s not copy and pasted from another source. Search engines are very smart and they know when you’re plagiarizing.
Another trick that will help increase your Google ranking is to make your content easy to find. To do that it must be rich in keywords. That means that if you’re writing about The Ten Best American Microbreweries, you should mention this phrase several times in your article. As a general rule, you want the key phrase to also appear in the heading or sub-heading of the page.
All of this information comes from the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). to learn more about SEO marketing, read Search Engine Land’s handy guide to Search Engine Optimization. SEO is an inexpensive way to drive potential customers to your site. I talk about it in greater detail in my article called What is the Advantage of Having a Website.
2. Update Your Website Often
Google doesn’t want to send users to an outdated website that contains information that is no longer relevant. Even if the content on your site is timeless (e.g.: 10 Reasons To Get More Exercise), Google can’t possibly know that. That’s why you need to update your website often. It proves to Google that you’re relevant and you deserve search traffic.
3. Have an Attractive Website That Draws People In
One of the ways that Google determines search rankings is by measuring how long a user stays on a webpage. Imagine these two scenarios. A person makes a new search and they click on a result. They stay on this page for three minutes, and then they click two other links on that site. Then they go to another website, stay for ten seconds and leave.
Chances are, Google recorded all of that. They’re going to up the ranking of the first website, and lower the search rating of the second website. That’s why it’s so important to have an attractive website. If your website is visually appealing, people are likely going to stay there longer and your search rating will go up. For some good ideas about improving the appearance of your website, check out this article from Copyblogger called 3 Ways Your Web Design Can Better Connect You to Your Audience.
To summarize, you don’t need Google to find your site, you need Google to increase your search ranking. You can do that by having an attractive website that is filled with high quality written content (remember, Google can’t make heads or tails of images, videos or music). Update your site often and you’ll be well on your way to increasing your Google ranking.